C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 25

the recipe worked.

Here’s the recipe: coconut flour naan. The dough worked. I was able to create naan flats, pick them up and have them hang together, plus turn and lift with a spatula. And it tastes good. Oily, yes. We are now on the see-if-it-sticks-to-your-ribs test, meaning are you going to be hungry an hour after eating same. My sense is not. Accurate measure, as pointed out, is really helpful. Use a cup and tsp measure you can shave flat with the back of a knife: this assures there’s no visual trick in the measure.

Into a bowl put 3/4 cup coconut flour, 2 tablespoons psyllium powder, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp salt.

In a 2-cup measuring cup put 1 1/2 cups ice water. Spoon in coconut oil (it’s a solid) until water level says 2 cups. This means you have 1/2 cup coconut oil. Extract it with a slotted spoon to heat-safe bowl and microwave it: 2 min should be enough to melt it. Fill cup rest of way to 2 cups water and microwave 3 minutes to boiling (depends on your microwave)—

Mix dough with paddle or stout spoon, until it develops rubbery resistance, then shape into a ball and let rise 5 minutes. Lay ball on board, bisect from 6 to 12, bisect again from 10 to 5, and again from two to seven, or thereabouts, which should give you six pie sections. Shape into balls. One by one flatten them like a tortilla, and fry in half a tsp of coconut oil in hot skillet. Give it plenty of time to brown before trying to flip it: when all edges are brown, that’s about time. Serve hot.

You could drizzle a little no-cal pancake syrup, or add butter, or a little sugarfree jam. Or melted butter with garlic if you want to take it another direction.

It gets everything in the kitchen dirty, but the good news is if you have a sink with hot water and Dawn (cuts grease) it will rinse right off and leave very little for the dishwasher. Recipe serves 6. You’d only want one. It’s filling.

We ate 2. I cooked one more and am saving it in the fridge to see if it can reheat tomorrow for breakfast. I’m also saving one ball of dough in the fridge, for tomorrow, to see if it can be held in the fridge; and I’m freezing two dough balls, to see whether this is an option. I’ll let you know.

It tastes a little coconutty, not that much. Sort of like vaguely coconut flavored pancakes. Has a pancake texture.

Well, the piper must be paid, and diet is at hand…before the holidays hit.

And before Philcon.

I’ve found a recipe for coconut flour naan, and either it’s going to be bloody awful, or it’s going to help. If there’s one sin we both love it’s bread—and this recipe actually looks like it MIGHT be good. If it’s good, I may be able to convert it to other recipes.

Breakfast is the easiest meal for me myself, as I could eat bacon and eggs every meal for months and be happy, but even bacon and eggs for breakfast wears on Jane real fast. If we’re on strict Atkins, she personally (this is not saying for everybody) doesn’t suffer from cholesterol: long as she doesn’t do high carb, but eats proteins, she stays down. Me, I can eat most anything and remain immune. But—this has the promise of alternatives. I mean, even if it turns out coconut-flavored, I can cope with that.

Lunch and supper—well, we’re doing fairly ok for lunch in a mostly-lettuce chicken wrap…and supper is easy with most any meat and some cruciferous veggies or the like. But one thing we both know—there’s a time when the harm done by too much weight exceeds the harm of a pretty strict diet, and its inconvenience as well.

So tonight and tomorrow night, a little fling with chicken curry, but after that, we’re getting serious. I’ll let you know how this turns out and if the recipe’s any good. It’s scarily like cooking with coconut flour, coconut oil, and Metamucil, but (glug) if it turns out bread—it’s all good.

Happy birthday to Jane!

Shu’s trying to eat her bouquet of roses. Seishi wants to eat the ribbon.

What can I say? The cats are involved.

Books associated with Alliance Rising

We’re going to be putting out Finity’s End in Closed Circle. And others. I’m going to talk with Betsy about putting out Merchanter’s Luck in e- book, too.

There is already a book planned to follow Alliance Rising. It happened when we realized we have story left over. But it doesn’t mean I’m not writing more Foreigner books. We’re just going to be writing MORE books.

Jane and I are hitting our stride with the book

Jane’s done some fast catch-up: one reason for our writing down the history was to pick up the threads of that universe where I’d left them some years back. So now we’re actively working. Jane’s input is invaluable: she started out in the sciences, as she says, counting muons, back in the day; I started out with an interest in astronomy and then drifted into linguistics and archaeology, which entails earth sciences, so we both have useful background; and between us, we’re having a ball finding our ‘viewpoints’ and figuring what they’re up to. The two of us spark ideas off each other and we write alike. Now and again we’re completely unsure which of us wrote a particular passage, simply because we’re back and forth with the editing as well as the writing, and we forget whose idea it was. This is a good thing. And it’s a lot of fun.

Making progress.

We’re officially ready to start writing the actual Alliance Rising book, and along with it, we’re going to put Finity’s End into Closed-Circle. That’s a hundred or so years on…some of the same bunch.

We are ok.

Wind gusts to 50, but not the 100 of the forecasts. Our trees can take 40-50, no great worry.

Tired this morning. Maybe going to get a nap.

More Win 10 joy.

Apparently Win 10, which our desktop is, does not play nicely on housenets with Win 7…it really doesn’t play well with lower levels of Windows, but it doesn’t even talk nicely to 7. It wants a user name (which could be, oh, let us see, computer a, computer b, or some new one specific to the net—3 variables to guess) and a password, which we figure SHOULD match the user name, except that this COULD refer to the target computer, OR the password of the group, or the individual password of the originating computer) another 3 variables. Are we calculating the variables, friends? Plus are we considering the possibility of a keying error in one try or another? Win 10 wants you to link directly, not by housenet, but you’re still stuck. Oh, and if you’ve ever had a housenet created by a ‘dead’ computer, you have to go into REGEDIT and try to kill it from there, but you must do that on every one of, oh, 3-5 machines, some of which are like, printers, with no regedit, and fix it there and get it offline before, at computer speed, it can resurrect that former network, which persists like a movie zombie.

Maddening. We finally have one of ours talking to another, but not talking to the ‘central’ machine of the network…and we still don’t know the answers to all or any of the above. I have NEVER seen such a bollixed-up launch of a product as this, which reaches backward in its history to really screw things up which it is not even supposed to mess with.

Good news from Lynn—

The hurricane developed a second eye as a second storm out in the Atlantic collapsed, then Matthew wobbled off northward, leaving Lynn’s place in good shape. Dodged a real bullet with that one. Apparently the second storm, instead of reinforcing Matthew, siphoned off some of the energy…at least from what I gather from her report from the local weatherfolk.

Big sigh of relief.

All of you in the path of Matthew, take care: life first, property second.

Jane and I are concerned for our partner Lynn Abbey, who is in an area where the eye could pass, if it deviates. She’s battened down and prepared, but this is one heckuva storm.

Think supportive thoughts for all.